“I think every rape victim should be seen as a potential false accuser. Every single reporting victim of any crime should be seen as a potential false accuser. There’s a reason why “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is in the top ten list of things to avoid doing in the Bible. During Biblical times, there were numerous crimes that were capital crimes which could get you executed. If it wasn’t execution, you could get your hand chopped off or your ear cut off or your nose cut off. That’s why false accusations of crimes were so heavily disapproved of during Biblical times.The truth is, both rape and the false rape accusation are harm causing crimes. They both ruin people’s lives. Right now, we take one of those crimes so seriously that it results in multiple years in jail if convicted. The other crime we take so lightly that we call it “a misdemeanor”, “public mischief”, or occasionally, “perverting the course of justice.”

“People don’t really consider the impact of what happens to someone falsely accused of a crime that they could be thrown in jail for. That person could be arrested, handcuffed, removed from their home, put in a prison cell, and questioned. If you hired somebody to “rough up” a guy, ducktape his hands, hall him out of his house, and lock him in a tool shed somewhere for two days, you’d be guilty of multiple criminal offences.

“When a woman makes a false rape accusation against a man, it’s the police who do the equivalent of all those things to the man she’s accusing. They do it to him on her behalf. She gets to avoid all the charges that would have happened if she had hired a thug to do those things. She just gets charged with filing a false police report which is a misdemeanor. At worst, it might require her to do community service.

“As a victim of sexual violence, I would say being falsely accused is worse. I have kids. If I was forced to have sex when I didn’t want to, I could still come home to my kids. As difficult as it might be, I could still be around the people that I love. I know I would have their sympathy. I’d have the sympathy of people in the community who know what I’ve been through. When I feel like I can apply for a job again, no employer is going to say, “You were raped. I’m not going to hire you.”

“There isn’t the entire apparatus of the criminal justice system with police and lawyers and judges and prosecutors and guardians trying to separate me from my partner. There’s no one trying to take my kids away from me because I’m unfit. There’s no one who is going to lock me in a room for the next five years. There’s none of that.

“All of my problems, if I’m raped, are in me. Meanwhile, I have all this external help available to me. I have support from my family. I have my life intact. I may be psychologically traumatized by the rape but I still have my kids, I still have my husband, I still have a job, I still have the ability to get a job, I still have my freedom. When you falsely accuse someone of rape, what they experience is not just one person victimizing them. The person falsely accused faces an entire system supported by the government going after them. That’s after their friends and family have possibly abandoned them too.

“That entire system is looking to put the falsely accused man in a jail cell for the next five years where he won’t have access to his partner or his kids. When he does get out, his kids may be completely inaccessible to him. The government may say he’s not fit to even be with them unsupervised. Sometimes they declare he isn’t fit to be with them at all.”

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